Maupin's U.s. `Tales' A Gift From Britain

January 05, 1994|By Bart Mills. Special to the Tribune.

Shhhh! Don't tell the secret!

If you lived in San Francisco in the late '70s and read Armistead Maupin's daily fictional column "Tales of the City," or if you read the sextet of books based on his columns, don't spoil others' enjoyment by telling the secret at the center of the "Tales" dramatization on TV.

When PBS-Ch. 11 airs the six-hour British-made mini-series on "American Playhouse," starting at 9 p.m. Monday, the rest of America will share in the oddities of America's oddest city. The show will offer the most sexually frank images ever seen on U.S. broadcast television, though some PBS affiliates will air a slightly censored version.

Maupin's funny, topical columns and books celebrated San Francisco and the people of every sexual coloration it attracted, and the program shows a lot of what they liked to do.

Set in the gaudy days before AIDS struck, "Tales" interweaves the lives of the out-there tenants of a wide-open San Francisco boardinghouse. The wise and tolerant landlady, Anna Madrigal, played by Olympia Dukakis with a Mona Lisa smile, considerately tapes marijuana joints to the door of incoming residents.

There is the young girl fresh from the Midwest who finds that the dishy guy she meets at the supermarket is more interested in boys. There is the middle-age lawyer who finds that love is stranger than he imagined. There's the gynecologist who cruises at the roller rink.

"Everyone in the story has a secret that finally emerges," says Dukakis, who is wearing a long, flowing garment that on closer examination turns out to be more like harem pants than a dress. "Because of the secrets, the story has a continual air of suspense. It's like life-funny, stupid, sad, horrific all at once."

"Tales," with its relaxed view of gays, pot and unconventional language, defied adaptation since its publication in book form in 1978. Warner Bros. optioned it and announced that the film would be released in 1980. It would have been the first studio-made film depicting uncloseted gays leading ordinary and largely happy lives.

Attempts to sell the story to the networks elicited the response, "This show might need a health warning," as one network executive told "Tales" co-producer Antony Root. HBO held the option for a long time but backed off in the end. After Maupin's books became best sellers in Britain, the upscale commercial network Channel Four (which also backed "The Crying Game") picked it up and put $8 million into it.

The British producing group brashly chose to film in San Francisco and Los Angeles with a virtually all-American cast. But director Alastair Reid is British, and the script adhered to British standards of literary fidelity. Armistead Maupin, observing shooting of a scene set on his fictional "Barbary Lane" re-created on a sound stage in Los Angeles, says, "There's more freedom in Britain to film stories of modern life in an honest way.

"I was naive about Hollywood at first. I assumed that the revolution that happened in my life had also happened here. In the end, I didn't want any Hollywood money in this production because that would have meant Hollywood censorship."

Maupin (pronounced MAW-pin), a stocky, soft-spoken Vietnam veteran from North Carolina, came out of the closet in the early '70s in San Francisco and worked at various jobs before beginning his "Tales of the City" column in the Chronicle in 1976. He comes from a military family in Raleigh.

"Tales" aired to acclaim in Britain last fall, and Channel Four is in pre-production to film the second book in Maupin's series, "More Tales of the City." Why did it take the British to get this very American material on the screen?

In Britain, says producer Root, "Television grows out of a tradition of public service, while America's comes from a tradition of selling goods. The act of watching TV in America is different from watching in Britain. In Britain, informed and educated people can watch TV for entertainment. There are fewer opportunities for Americans."

Britain has the capacity to fund productions for minority audience channels at the level of a majority channel. If you tried to sell a six-hour adaptation of a writer like Paul Auster in America, it couldn't be funded at the level of a Judith Krantz.

"When we chose Richard Kramer, an American who had written for `thirtysomething,' to adapt Maupin for us, he was astonished to hear us tell him that we'd lose our finance if he cut the four-letter words out or limited the gay material. American adapters are expected to change the source material. The British tradition involves keeping the tone of the original. I think he was exhilarated by our requirements for fidelity."